Postage for Pakistan and other parts of the planet

Friday, April 13, 2012

The need for intellectual honesty

Because of my love and concern for
the Cappella degli Scrovegni
(Scrovegni Chapel) in Padua, I joined an organization called avaaz.org in order to sign
a petition urging the Padovan city council to do everything possible to save
this priceless human treasure that is threatened by urban development (the
chapel houses the one of first major fresco cycles of the Renaissance and thus
in Western art since the fall of the Roman Empire, it’s by Giotto, and it’s
spectacular).

Ever since then, they've sent me
other petitions to sign, and I received the latest one tonight.

They asked me to stand with them in
opposition to a bill in the Honduran Congress that is about to become law. It
would make illegal the use, prescription, or sale of the morning after pill
(MAP). (See here for an article on the previous and identical 2009 legislation.)

That they would oppose this sort of
thing is more than expected by left of center organizations. Other big causes
right now are “Save the Rhinos!” and a campaign to stop the re-launch of Rupert
Murdoch’s “News of the World” and “The Sun,” both UK newspapers (Murdoch, in
case you don’t know, owns Fox News and other editorially conservative outlets).
The big endorsement quote comes from Al Gore, who credits the group from “making
a big difference.”

They are also supporting some
causes that are not typically left/right, such as the controversial Internet
bill in the US Congress that Google and Wikipedia et al are fighting. Additionally, they’re decrying and trying to
put a stop to the sexual traffic and murder of Mayan women. On this last one, I
gladly stand with them.

That said, with the MAP issue, given
that I support the Church’s teaching on contraception (and would even if I was
not Catholic given the Natural Law arguments), I would have ignored the issue,
deleted the e-mail, and moved on, except for one thing: The language they used
to prompt support for their campaign concerning the Honduran situation. Since I
can’t know their hearts, I won’t call it lying.

However, at best the organization’s
team did some very poor research or fudged the facts to present the most
compelling case to its base. While that may not qualify as an out-and-out lie,
it is intellectually dishonest and thus immoral.

To wit, they write, the “religious
lobby ... erroneously defines the morning after pill as ‘abortion’.”

On the contrary, the morning after
pill is an abortifacient. As reported
by Catholic News Agency, the Department of Medicine in Public Health of the
University of Bielefeld (Germany) conducted a study that was published in the
magazine Fertility and Sterility. The “study used data from multiple clinical
studies with advanced mathematical models and concluded that if emergency
contraception only inhibited ovulation, its true effectiveness would only range
between 8-49 percent.

“If it acted before ovulation and
if it inhibited ovulation completely, its true effectiveness would be between
16-90 percent. The rest of the pill’s effectiveness consists in its
anti-implantation mechanisms, which cause an abortion.”

A 2001 article in the American Journal of Obstetrics and
Gynecology titled “Effectiveness of emergency contraceptive pills between
72 and 120 hours after unprotected sexual intercourse,” by Isabel Rodrigues,
Fabienne Grou, Jacques Joly states that preventing implantation of a fertilized
egg is “probably the main mechanism of action of the morning after pill.” (See Volume
184, Issue 4, March 2001, pp. 531-537.)

An article on the subject I found
at the excellent Canadian website, catholiceducation.org says, “The MAP may
unfavorably alter the endometrial lining of the uterus regardless of when in
the cycle it is used, with the effect persisting for days. The reduced rates of
observable pregnancy in women who use MAP in the pre-ovulatory, ovulatory, and
post-ovulatory phases are consistent with a post-fertilization effect, an
abortion.”

Citing a 1998 article in theBritish medical journal The Lancet, the
article then says, “The MAP is of two main types; one is a combination of
estrogen and a progestogen and the other is a progestogen only. The former can
act as a contraceptive by inhibiting ovulation, or it may cause an abortion by
preventing implantation. The latter acts primarily as an abortifacient. The
abortifacient progestogen type of MAP is currently in common use because it
causes less nausea and vomiting than the combined type and is significantly
more effective.”

In addition to misstating the case
here, they couch the situation in Honduras as being like that in other Latin
American countries with regards to sexual assault (“Emergency contraception is
vital for women everywhere, but especially in countries where sexual violence
against women is out of control”).

It is true that several Latin
American countries have relatively high rates of sexual violence. This is not
at all true, however, for Honduras.

In 1995, that nation’s rape rate was
(depending on your source) .27 or .37 per 100,000 (I didn’t look at it for the
US in that year). The nation’s 1998 rate was 1.17. That is higher, even a steep
increase. Compared with 34.4 for the US, though, it’s practically
non-existent. Indeed, Honduras’ sexual assault rate is below that of every
industrialized country.

Now, certainly, women there are
more likely to suffer from domestic abuse than they are in the US. However,
while criminal and heinous, physical violence is not ipso facto sexual assault “requiring” the morning after pill.

I worked in politics for quite some
time in communications. I fully understand the desire to fudge facts to make
them say what you want them to. In the end, however, doing so only hurts one’s
cause if someone is willing to do due diligence and exposes the duplicity.

Hopefully, this organization and
all others like it—whatever its motivating politics or creed—will realize that
their interests and those of the common good are best served by being
transparent and honest.

About Me

This is a blog about saints to help spread their example so that by this, we may all become saints, that is, holy, our best selves, people who are fully positioned to know, love, and serve God in this life so as to be happy with Him in the next.
Who am I? A son of God by adoption through baptism into the Body of Christ (and so thankful for it), husband, and father of the best children in the world.